Midjourney Medical Announces Ultrasonic CT and Spa Initiative

Midjourney, known for its AI image generation, has announced a new initiative called Midjourney Medical. This division aims to revolutionize healthcare and individuals' relationships with their bodies. The company, being bootstrapped and profitable, states it can afford to focus on improving the human experience, a goal it believes other frontier AI labs might not prioritize.

Current Medical Imaging Limitations

Currently, options for internal body imaging include:

• MRI machines: These are time-consuming, taking about an hour, and can be uncomfortable.
• CT scans: Faster than MRIs but expose patients to a microdose of radiation.
• DEXA scans: More convenient but can lead to disappointing results regarding body composition.

All these methods are expensive, often entangled in healthcare bureaucracy, require referrals, involve insurance battles, and have long waiting times.

Midjourney's Solution: Ultrasonic CT

Midjourney's goal is to develop an "ultrasonic CT" device that is cheap, fast, and accessible. The proposed device works as follows:

1. Immersion: Users step onto a platform that slowly lowers them into a shallow pool of warm water.
2. Scanning: As the user sinks, they pass through a ring containing half a million tiny sensors. Each sensor, about the size of a grain of sand, is equipped with a microscopic speaker and microphone.
3. Data Collection: These sensors fire ultrasonic waves through the body at a rate of a million times per second. The waves return in different shapes depending on the tissues they pass through, generating terabytes of data per second.
4. Image Reconstruction: Midjourney, having perfected the reconstruction of coherent images from ambiguous and noisy input in its AI image generation, will apply this expertise to process the ultrasonic data.

The resulting images are expected to be similar to those from current MRIs but generated nearly 100 times faster and without the discomfort of a traditional MRI. Since the process uses only sound waves and water, Midjourney believes scans can become much more common.

Midjourney Spa

To make scanning more appealing and accessible, Midjourney plans to launch "Midjourney Spa," a 25,000 square-foot facility in San Francisco by the end of 2027. This spa will feature hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges, and "cozy rooms of pools of golden light, which softly scan your body." The idea is that individuals can enjoy a relaxing day at the spa, and a full-body scan will occur as a seamless part of the experience.

Challenges and Criticisms

Despite the ambitious vision, there are doubts, particularly from medical professionals:

• Physical Limitations of Ultrasound: Ultrasound is effective for soft tissues near the surface (e.g., thyroid, kidneys, abdomen). However, sound waves cannot travel through air or bone. This means air-filled lungs and the brain (protected by the skull) are largely invisible to this technology, a limitation that software cannot overcome.
• Early Stage Development: The technology is still in its very early stages. While a 60-second scan is the goal, the current prototype takes about 20 minutes.
• Regulatory Approval: The device currently lacks FDA clearance. Legally, it can only provide body composition information.

Future Timeline

Midjourney's plan for the coming years includes:

• Next Year: Refining hardware, conducting research trials, and building the first research spa.
• Ongoing: Submitting test results to the FDA to gradually enable disease detection capabilities.
• 2028: Developing Gen 3 of their scanner.
• 2031: Scaling a fleet of over 50,000 machines, aiming to provide monthly scans to a billion people.

While the Midjourney Spa is unlikely to significantly reduce mortality rates in the immediate future, and the physical limitations of ultrasound are valid concerns, the initiative represents a refreshing approach from a profitable AI lab focused on accessible health optimization.